Friday, January 14, 2011
L'identité judiciaire
More from Houellebecq - having got into the third part of 'La Carte et le territoire' for the second time. Much talk of people called 'l'identité judiciaire', who appear to approximate to our scene of crime people. Pleased to find that M. M. H. finds the way that lots of people in white space suits take over crime scenes, often erecting large white tents as they go, as irritating as I do. OK, so these people do sometimes find the evidence which enables us to bang a bad person up. But they are so full of themselves; they have taken on something like a liturgical or ecclesiastical role. Their goings on sometimes seem to be as unpleasant and intrusive as whatever is was that resulted in their being there in the first place. An extreme case being the medical examinations of children during the years when the nation in general and certain newspapers in particular were fascinated by and obsessed with satanic abuse. The years when gung-ho social workers were commandeering helicopters to descend on respectable New Age folk going about their lawful business in remote islands.
Part of the price that we pay for progress.
Then got to wondering why the French call this branch of the judiciary by this name. I was able to find out that it was a sub-directorate (rather than a branch) of the technical and scientific police. But I did not find out where the judicious identity came from, although a clue may be that I believe that one, if French, is supposed to carry one's identity card while in France and be able to produce it for verification on demand by an authorised agent of the state. A useful KPI of state control being the number of people who are so authorised expressed as a percentage of the total population.
Nearer home, I read recently that our own FSS (Forensic Science Service, the people who, inter alia, used to do thousands and thousands of DNA tests at a large facility near Meriden, an interesting little village nicely documented by Wikipedia. Not the one in Connecticut) is about to be abolished in favour of private testing laboratories. Part, presumably of the bonfire of quangoes. I have a recollection that the FSS has not been in existence all that long, having been created from one or more outfits which used to live inside the Home Office. The wheel of management fashion continues to spin. But as I found with CJIT the other day (10th January), not so easy to trace the evolution of government from the web, with the FSS web site being very gung ho about how spiff they are at all kinds of forensic services but much less gung ho about their own history.
But perhaps that is just me. I remember organising a lecture about the internet once, which was full of the history of the internet and which I found fascinating. But I was taken to task by most of the audience for wasting their time with all this ancient history. They wanted to be told about the scene today, not the scene yesterday.
# posted by Jim @ 1:05 AM 
